Great pick for a festive tale! I have a feeling I didn't vote for this in the poll, but I'm glad it made it through anyway. We've all been there, right: angsty teenager fed up with stupid family Christmas goes in search of something darker, ends up in way over their head, dives into a river and has to recover in hospital the next day?
Ahem. On a more serious note. To me this definitely read like a "first draft" of "The Shadow over Innsmouth", but not necessarily in a bad way. A man travels to an old New England seaside town in search of something related to his family history. It turns out that his family history is even darker than he thought (though if I'm remembering "Shadow" correctly, that narrator didn't know as much about a dark secret - certainly didn't have ancestors who were hung as witches). It even turns out that his ancestors aren't even human (incidentally, the mask-like face made me think of a trope Lovecraft re-used in "The Whisperer in Darkness). Maybe I'm just being too influenced by the later story, but I do think that non-human is what Lovecraft was going for here, even if it's not as explicit as in "Shadow" and they may or may not be Deep Ones (or proto-Deep Ones). You could read the comment about them coming from the sea either way: they came out of the sea, or they came across the sea from another land. I'd even say that Lovecraft himself was intentionally vague and didn't necessarily know himself what was going on.
I thought the descriptive language throughout was excellent, especially in the opening paragraph and in the cave scene (although as with many Lovecraft stories, there was a bit too much flapping and flopping for my taste...). I even enjoyed the idea of the narrator just sitting down to read the Necronomicon to fill time. The only things that really pulled me out of the story were: the weird description of the creatures the townsfolk were riding to get to the festival - I know Lovecraft was going for something Boschian here, but it was too much for me; and the ease with which the narrator acquired a copy of the Necronomicon again at the end. Again, maybe I'm being too influenced by Lovecraft's later stories, but that just didn't ring true at all. It was basically an excuse to have the narrator read that key passage. A better way to do it, in my opinion, would have been to have him remember having read that passage earlier.
Oh, and this definitely happened by the way. Another way to read the epigraph and connect it to the story is that the townsfolk have put an illusion in place to make Kingsport seem like a regular town and hide what lies beneath the surface. Just because we normal people see the illusion doesn't mean its true.
Haha, yeah, we have all been there. For me it was a lake, not a river, but it amounted to the same thing.
Great analysis here. It's a good story, but it does feel like practice for The Shadow Over Innsmouth, and so in some ways it also falls a little flat. Still, I really enjoyed the imagery as a bit of poetry, and I think we'll be glad to have already done this one when we get to the later works.
I'm not comfortable with where we left our discussion, really. I don't think Lovecraft intended for these to be Native Americans in the sense that we would use that word -- indeed, I think that he had in mind that these Kingsport wizards (is that a quidditch team?) were in Massachusetts long before Native Americans arrived, too. I could certainly believe that they aren't human, as well, but my instinct is that the non-human qualities are the result of their wizardry. In either case, though, I think you are spot-on that the ambiguity is intentional, and I think it really works for this story. It certainly has stuck with me in ways that it wouldn't if the explanations had been straight-forward.
That's a brilliant observation about the point of the epigraph. We're going to see Kingsport again, and now I'm going to be on the lookout for this.
I feel like the ambiguity about the identity of the Kingsport wizards (the people in the story, not the quidditch team) is a blessing to the story but a curse to our discussion. We could talk about it for a long time and not really reach any conclusions.
On balance, thinking they're entirely non-human (or human hybrids) is probably a result of my own biases about Lovecraft's story-telling tropes. The key description is definitely the bit about them being "an old folk" who "had come as dark furtive folk from opiate southern gardens of orchids". That definitely doesn't sound like Native Americans to me (although I concede I'm not an expert, just not aware of opiate gardens of orchids in America). The contrast with the blue-eyed fishers (European colonists) is obviously important too, but doesn't tell us much about the Kingsport folk themselves.
And since we can go beyond the text to the author himself in this case, Lovecraft's statement that he "had in mind the survival of some clan of pre-Aryan sorcerers" is really the final nail in the coffin of the non-human theory. You could take that term to refer to non-humans if this was a Howard story (for example), but for Lovecraft it seems like more of a stretch (especially this early in his career).
Then again, in the story we only have the author's perception/understanding of what's going on. So, invoking an unreliable narrator and death of the author, I'm going to go with the theory that they're human-proto-Deep One hybrids. They might have even been that before they arrived in Kingsport.
Ultimately, though, I think your conclusion is the one best supported by both the text and the author. But there is just enough of that wonderful ambiguity to allow me my own theory.
I really don't have anything to add: it's not very clear what these wizards are, but my first thought was something like Karanthir's idea. But then, maybe I'm also prejudiced by knowing HPL's later tales.
I read this tale, as is already said here also, as an excercise in style. I wonder if Lovecraft had at this point a clear image himself of what these 'deeptime creatures' were; something he elaborated in his later tales. Is it right that Lovecraft at this time still was influenced strongly by Poe? I can't say why exactly (maybe the getting mad, or the gothic descriptions, but not only that) but I feel there is more Poe in here than in, say, The Shadow over Innsmouth.
It has been a while since I last read "Shadow", but I'd say the descriptions are a lot more gothic in "Festival" so it seems like Poe's influence is stronger in this earlier story. "Shadow" has a more sort of proto-urban decay feel to the description of the buildings and town.
This will be something to keep an eye on when we (eventually) do this one.